Charles Edward Perugini

Charles Edward Perugini
Charles Edward Perugini painted by Lord Frederic Leighton in 1855
Perugini's portrait of his wife Kate.
A Summer Shower

Charles Edward Perugini (1 September 1839 – 22 December 1918), originally Carlo Perugini, was an Italian-born English painter of the Victorian era.

Perugini was born in Naples, but lived with his family in England from the ages of six to seventeen. He trained in Italy under Giuseppe Bonolis and Giuseppe Mancinelli, and in Paris under Ary Scheffer. He became a protégé of Lord Leighton, who brought him back to England in 1863. He may at first have worked as Leighton's studio assistant. Under Leighton's influence, he began as a painter of classical scenes; then "he turned to the more profitable pastures of portrait painting, and genre pictures of pretty women and children."[1]

In 1874, he married the youngest daughter of novelist Charles Dickens; as Kate Perugini[2] she pursued her own artistic career, sometimes collaborating with her husband. Perugini's 1878 picture Girl Reading, perhaps his best-known single work, is in the collection of the Manchester City Art Galleries.

Perugini's portrait of Sophy Gray, the sister-in-law of Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais, was for many years mistaken for a work by Millais himself.

Perugini and his wife maintained an active social life in artistic circles of their era.

References

  1. ^ Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1999; p. 227.
  2. ^ Lucinda Hawksley, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter, New York, Doubleday, 2006.

External links


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